SCIENCE

Violin Memory announced that IBM Research used Violin Memory's 3200 Flash Memory Arrays to break IBM's previous General Parallel File System (GPFS) world record. Leveraging Violin's technology, IBM's GPFS scanned 10 billion files in 43 minutes, 37 times faster than the previous record of one billion files in three hours. Pushing the limits of existing storage capabilities, businesses with massive amounts of digital data can now perform critical storage tasks that keep pace with growing data environments.

"The strategic use of flash Memory Arrays is undeniable as large enterprises transition to petabyte scale at an accelerating rate," said Brian Marshall, senior analyst at Gleacher & Company. "Violin continues to reinforce their leadership position with its flash aggregation technology, resulting in best-in-class performance, scalability and reliability."

According to Jeff Janukowicz, research manager for solid state storage technology at IDC, "The explosion of data is challenging datacenter managers to deliver the performance necessary to meet user expectations. Solid state storage, like Violin's flash Memory Array solutions, can provide the low latency and high bandwidth necessary to deliver a significant performance benefit to these mission-critical applications and is one of the reasons we expect the market to grow rapidly over the next few years."

IBM GPFS is a high-performance, shared disk/storage file management system that allows businesses with multi-petabytes of data to have fast and reliable access to a common set of files. Typical GPFS applications include business intelligence, financial analytics, digital media, big data and seismic data processing. As the amount of digital data produced skyrockets, businesses are tasked with processing, storing and accessing all of this data in a timely manner. Traditional data management systems will be unable to process information on this scale, potentially exposing organizations to potential critical data loss.

During the IBM world record run, Violin's low latency and high bandwidth Memory Arrays enabled IBM's GPFS cluster to scale more effectively than ever before. Violin's Memory Arrays include RAID protection across modules and allows in-service replacement of flash, which means customers have a true "enterprise class" solid state storage solution at price points matching much slower performance hard disk drive (HDD) storage arrays. At a scan rate of four million files per second, GPFS and Violin enables all large file systems to be managed faster than the typical enterprise file systems.

"IBM is one of several well-known storage companies leveraging Violin's flash Memory Arrays to break world records and transform the data center," said Don Basile, CEO of Violin Memory. "Flash Memory Arrays are the hottest technologies around and its rapid adoption is driving major trends in Mobile, 4G, Cloud Computing, Social Networks and Big Data."